and i secretly promised to never be like it's sad one does not need a funeral the same as one enters the mind gets consumed with this one different speech because there are no other takers. to claim that mainstream media has met its maker. you guys i made a professional is powerpoint to show you how r.t. america fits into the greater media landscape our team is not all laughter all right but we are a solid alternative to the bullshit that we don't skew liberal or conservative and as you can see from his bar graph we don't skew the facts either the talking head left these talking head righties oh there you go above it all to look at world r.t. america is in the spotlight now every really hard have no idea how to classify as and it actually took me way more time and i care to admit.

hello i'm tom hartman in washington d.c. and here's what's coming up tonight on the big picture donald trump ran for president on a platform of protecting social security but is he now trying to sabotage social security that and more in tonight's politics panel with julio rivera newkirk in just a moment and as ugly as his right wing nationalism could be now former white house chief strategist steve bannon had some legitimately good ideas about the economy

does his ouster mean that we're stuck with so-called free trade for good i'll ask alan tonelson later on in the program. steve bannon's white house days officially over could trump soon find and up on the chopping block let's ask tonight's politics panel. with me for the night's politics panel our earlier a vera editorial director for reactionary times and progressive organizer with democracy spring thank you both for being with us tonight let's get started thank you so much thank you just in case you haven't heard the big news steve bannon is out at the white house depending on who you ask the now former white house strategist was either fired or handed in his resignation a few weeks ago and left earlier today this news of bennett's departure comes of

course just a few days after he spoke to the american prospect and publicly mocked. the white house's north korea strategy bash some of his administration colleagues and called the all right losers so who else spent the afternoon listening to ding dong the witch is dead and could this actually be a dangerous moment for our country given the ban and to the best of my knowledge was about the only person in this administration with a sensible position on north korea and more broadly a war dove when it came to places like syria and others around the world. your thoughts on that. one thing trump. will resign as soon as all of us in our country who are will not accept a president who defends white supremacists demanded we saw a president who did him out and call for that today every living former president should do the same the democrats need to get on board with the call for impeachment and republicans need to start thinking beyond twenty eighteen and looking ahead to

their legacies but your thoughts on van on bennett well i think it's a victory for the progressive you know resistance that he's out. there were some you know redeeming elements that he brought to the table in terms of you know the kind of populist elements in the noninterventionist policies but just like we can never work with trump to try to make those good things happen and never collaborate with someone who is doing the right frankly evil things that he was pushing for and we couldn't look to bannana some for someone you know who's going to bring those things is what we've got to fight in other ways with other allies to make sure that we have good policy on north korea is a good thing that's bannon's out we've got to continue to push for everyone who defends white supremacy in the white house to be out and that means trump so julio you know of both hillary mosel any famously made the trains run on time you know yes there are occasionally people can get things done. you know do you when do you think that trump is going to resign and what do you think the more he's knowledgeable easer as i and listens. listen the departure of steve bannon is

unfortunate because i did like his policy of economic nationalism but the fact is we need to get the north korean regime out and that's the bottom line if you don't agree with trump strategy on it that's one thing the way he went about it i certainly disagree with but the fact is that we've set up north korea and i mean the united states not the trump administration years ago to be in the position that they're in now you're going to have an acceleration of that based on what the obama administration did with iran and believe me they got thirty times the amount of money and multiple times exponentially more in terms of technology and they're going to be enriching uranium much faster so this is another problem another seed has been sown that donald trump unfortunately has to deal with i do like banning and i agree with a lot of his ideas but i think he was certainly wrong here. breitbart was running

a headline earlier today that said be prepared for a ban on the barbarian. you know steve bannon maybe come in coming to coming to get you the do not you but you know that he was he was either going to go against i don't i don't know what this means and i've also heard he's going to go and i want to get on his number one thirty always has done historically which is attack the establishment steve bannon put out an interesting piece in december of twenty fifteen himself. where he attacked paul ryan and the establishment republicans on the on the bus build it basically funded to the fundamental transformation of america under obama the republicans the moderates the majority of the republicans right now are a liar they go on the campaign trail and they spew conservatism that when it comes down to the nitty gritty they do what the special interest that funded their campaigns are instructing them to do you are right about that but steve bannon is not the solution to that just like trump is not the solution to that they talk about this economic nationalism but they. couple that with the frankly

a white supremacist agenda that's attacking him or her know they have been let in how through how you look at them was enough to go there raise it until they did today that was put together in very popular on twitter this shows donald trump from two thousand and one to two thousand and sixteen done now david duke white nationalism and neil naziism this is a live look at his body because don't rush into narrative that will be nothing no one is iran jury has not recommended any charges against anybody affiliated with the donald trump administration. the bush presidency come out and draw a red line in the sand you know more opposition to trump and the only people defending you are people like richard spencer and david duke you know that you've crossed the line and no have not has some time and i was doing trying to trump has a lot of support still within his base and his base neal not he's there working class people there wanted improvement in the economy grew and we're starting to get

it little by little he's done a lot on the deregulation side we still need tax reform we still need to address here just a minute there's just not having an obstructionist congress in his own party quite for a lot of. supporters were right when they said the system is rigged and that working class people get left behind in our country including white folks but the solution is not what trump is pushing that's going to divide us turn us against each other we need to bring working life was to get announcing people on both sides look at that rise up here on the most polarizing wasn't there is i don't hear oh michael see link and that was funded by leftist organizations we're going to find out and i'm sure it's going to come out soon that those leftist bills and to fuzz and those black lives matter being funded by people like george soros and they quite frankly have blood on their hands oh yeah they they they definitely you know must they were they would not show up there or somebody didn't cross their palms with cat hey listen last friday there was no beef in sharlee it in storage saturday when the left winger showed up you can look at it started when people show their. at that

monument chanting jews will not replace death to jews those are the people that trump defended in that press conference and i'm shocked that you would come on today ended up in this well then that's not the way we're going to make a difference for we're going to have a lot of people decided that we're not what's going to underwrite a billion people to give the monuments to history are there to remind us not to repeat that you know my name of these these monuments are not there to warn us not to repeat the history they're there to celebrate their sad day at history subject to the whole day or they are say come is that what we have that may be a memorial is that what we have the m.l.k. memorial so we're celebrating with these people are going to be the next things they go down because. early no then in a traditional barry jar the is the left going to attack martin luther king doubt what they're going to. say even discerning say save the straw man for his room then or i mean these are all even why even without stepping on man and trump and strange and still appears dead set on dismantling the so-called

administrative state according to d.c. report the white house is now pushing to send around fifteen thousand social security administration's employees into early retirement that's about a quarter of their work force the move would likely cause even more backlog in an agency that is already struggling with understaffing and expects expects to see benefit payments jump to a trillion dollars next year as more and more baby boomers age into stores this is sabotage of social security plain and simple how is downtrodden going to explain this to the people who voted for him there on the campaign trail he said he was going to protect social security medicaid medicare well you know it has nothing to do with social security for people who have paid into the system the people that are retiring this is why the abuses of social security did you hear what i said is that all they have by all reports he's going to cut the staff by ten percent the cuts are going to equal a ten percent cut in august twenty five percent cut it maybe ten percent of the

neighbors temporist. it maybe ten percent of the budget leaves twenty five percent of the staff and even if it's ten percent you know right now people trying to get social security you know in getting the law into getting every detail going to be here to get its holdings and earlier is like that. for a minute ended liability you know you have a listener marginalise he's all really yelling our economy right now you have to listen once in a while julio ok are three of us here please you know if you have some risk i'm sorry that you know out of. my point is that you know republicans have as long history of breaking govern they tried it is a v.a. ten years ago defund the v.a. throw it into a crisis and then as soon as it's in a crisis all the republicans got my god oh my god it's in a crisis our hair is on fire they cause that crisis they're doing the same thing with the so security administration that i think you know when bernie sanders said that trump is a fraud this is exactly what he's talking about this guy goes on campaign says i'm not going to cut social security i'm not going to cut medicaid not going to cut medicare and now we know for

a fact that not tried to cut all three he's tried to cut all three he's not a champion for the working class he's not only is the defender of white supremacy he's a fraud and he's an ultimate billionaires like himself already benefits are being cut what is going to people's ability to access those benefits that's clear there's already what this does what this does is it causes frustration when you get millions of people who are trying to get the services that they paid into for years and years and they're told i'm sorry you're going to there are any problems are your insulin we're accessing their services it was eight and a certainty they actually are so scared of disability right now can take as much as two years to get at a certain point trump supporters like yourself you need to really tighten your conscience julio and ask yourself there were there were real reasons are you frustrated with the set a score that support a trump there's folks in west virginia like where i'm from that are hurting but the solution to them is not somebody like donald trump and it's at some point you've got to recognize you've got to give up the political game and become part of a solution that brings people together in our country that makes a real difference for working people that is a luxury and that's all even or even jeremy lived through the last eight years.

even trump knew that during the campaign he promised he was never going to cut the social safety net i mean he put this promise on his campaign website we're showing it on this one and then this is actually benefits to recipients work what they were trying to show on medicaid look at what they were trying to do on medicare with trump care that would have led to tens of millions a primate in everything it was out on the house that's right so ridiculous and up with the horrible bill with here is going to sign it on the health insurance you want to sign it isn't because there's more about winning than about the american people is campaigning with the guns holding the rallies and talking to us here although in the freedom caucus well how about if the deal is the senate bill was going to representative of republicanism or conservatism i agree on some points with ok. newkirk a rare moment of agreement perhaps i don't thank you both for being with us to be with you think coming up ever serious about fixing nafta which he wants the worst trade deal ever or was that just another one of his campaign trail scams will find

out when alan thompson joins us right to put. our culture is awash in lives dominated by streams of never ending electronic hallucinations that birthed fiction until they are indistinguishable we have become the most. society on politics as a species of analyst and needless political theater politicians more than just celebrity are two ruling parties are in reality one party or party and those who attempt to punk this. breathless universe of the design to push through the cruelty and exploitation of the little boy are pushed so far to the margins of says

. including by a public broadcasting system that has sold its soul for corporate money that we might as well be mice squeaking against an avalanche. we must. protect the american middle class has been railroaded by washington politics. big money corporate interests a lot of boys that's how it is in the culture in this country now that's where i come in. i'm michel. martin all make sure you don't get railroaded you'll get the straight talk in the break news.

if there was one unifying theme to donald trump's presidential campaign besides. borderline overweight nationalism it was that our experiment so-called free trade as failed the idea that we as a country should return to a sensible trade policy was arguably one reason why and perhaps even the main reason why traditionally democratic voters cast their ballots for trump back in november but can donald trump actually deliver. on his promise to make trade policy

great again joining me now is alan tonelson economist founder of reality check blog and author of the race to the bottom why a worldwide worker surplus an uncontrolled free trade are sinking american living standards alan welcome back great to be here tony thank you for this so first of all your thoughts on on steve dan's departure he is policy perspectives in many regards particular with regard to war and trade are very different at least as far as as i can tell from pretty much everybody that has has been left behind that's exactly right and his departure for whatever reason raises major questions about the future of the trump economic populist agenda especially on trade policy and there are really two reasons for this war and i think it's been pretty widely appreciated the so-called goldman sachs crowd doesn't want anything to do with anything that could possibly limit or curb or restrain globalization any carry

conan steve you know. you see there's five goldman sachs former executives or c. writers in the inside the trumpeter so exactly but there's one other faction that's been crucially important so far in restraining what what look to be president from straight impulses and that's the foreign policy crowd this national security crowd and especially with the crisis having erupted surrounding north korea. they are really reluctant to support any measures that could possibly rock the boat with u.s. allies in japan and south korea and also there are of course very mindful about what they consider to be vladimir putin's very aggressive designs on eastern europe and so they're very reluctant to rock any nato related boats and even if we were not in this particular situation with north korea they would have been. no doubt emerged

as major voices and forces for restraint regarding trade policy and china to their genitals is we don't want to get into a conflict with china right i think at this point that's less of a concern there there does seem to be still this dream and fact what i would consider an outright fantasy that holding out the prospect of improved trade ties with the united states can induce china to put decisive economic pressure on north korea in fact specifically so much pressure that they would be convinced to actually roll back their surprisingly robust nuclear program i just don't see that happening if only because if china was so convinced that the north's nuclear program was a major problem it would have already acted right. so now after new renegotiation talks began this week where we are completely overshadowed of course by the white house drama by us completely self-inflicted wounds that the president bush we

thought that that the president has visited on himself we haven't had too much press coverage and so it's hard to know what's actually going on behind closed doors but we do have from my perspective at least very encouraging u.s. plan for renegotiating nafta that at long last is talking about turning nafta into what it should have been all along an engine of growth and job creation for all of north america an aim that would be accomplished by turning the region into a genuine trade bloc and in fact that's what many nafta backers promised or suggested would happen back in the early one thousand nine hundred what is the difference between a genuine trade bloc and what nafta a genuine trade bloc make certain that the vast majority of the benefits of expanded trade and freedom. trade go to the signatories and that countries outside

the region aren't able to enjoy that trade agreements benefits without encouraging any sort of without incurring any obligations whatever and it's that latter situation that we're in with nafta right now and the big problem is that an enormous percentage of the goods freely traded inside this current nafta zone the u.s. canada mexico have very high levels of non nafta content which means enormous lost opportunities for workers inside the nafta zone so if i could boil it down to just a sentence or two actual practical stuff it's that. you know you may get a computer that says it was assembled in mexico but ninety percent of the stuff made in it came from either china or germany exactly so so it really isn't a mexican product exists so in mexico is not expanding as a result of that they're not growing because they're not doing manufacturing and that's hurting the entire north american trade block and china and germany and

other countries outside north america are reaping major benefits from wide open access to the u.s. market which is of course the big prize in any global trade negotiation and again incurring no obligations whatever to open their markets in their own right what do we know. so what about chapter is a chapter eleven chapter nine hundred ninety nine time of the i.z.'s the into a. state dispute that i thought i wouldn't talk about what actually i considered to be much more important which is the the process that nafta set up for resolving trade disputes among the three nafta partners and at present it does contain very important preferences for for u.s. interests it permits the u.s. trade laws system to essentially overawed whatever decisions are made are made by nafta panels comprised of representatives from the from. all three countries to

ensure mainly that mexico and canada don't dump predatory predatory only price the goods into the u.s. market i consider that to be totally fit and proper because the united states represents roughly ninety percent of the total nafta market so the idea that it should have special privileges really shouldn't be so terribly controversial but it is and it's going to be a big sticking point with canada in particular it seems right fascinating are that are the. what others what. let me go back to the investors here ok i'm and i'm not sure that this is the same chapter this is the one where where a corporation a corporation can say to a government that your regulations prevented us from making a profit so we're going to sue you there's thirty two billion dollars lawsuits against against u.s. government entities right now under nafta that are in process so we're going to sue you and the arbiters of this are going to be three corporate lawyers who are going

to decide which generally means that the country gets screwed in the corporations michael pollan home that is a genuine problem no question but when we think about thirty two billion dollars obviously it sounds like a big amount of money but we're talking about a sixteen trillion dollar american economy and i don't believe that that should be such an overriding priority especially of left of center critics of nafta in fact i think it's far less important then what the trumpet ministration seems to be thinking about in terms of tightening up those so-called nafta rules of origin to make sure that all of the goods traded in sight nafta are overwhelmingly made in sight now after to the great benefit of workers in all three countries you have a absolutely brilliant analysis on your blog and you and i were talking about it on the air. i read it this afternoon as i go and you go through all the products. top

top ten or top twenty products that we're importing the top ten or top twenty products that we're exporting you know generally this doesn't have to do it now after the right world worldwide right and you know tell us what you discovered and what it means and how that is the product of our trade policy and actually this year's results so far and what i did was i compared the trade results from the first half of this year with the trade results from the first day of westfield because that's the best apples and apples comparison and i did it in tremendous detail and so is the detail on us and actually this year's results were more encouraging than they normally are because we saw that the united states is running big and actually improving trade surpluses in a greater number of advanced manufactured categories and that's good because those are the industries that create the best paying jobs by far except that's a very very small percentage of our imports from the list of your little i saw well

starts with oil and gold right that is that. that gets to the problem that is that the list of the most successful u.s. exports worldwide is still overly dominated by raw materials and of course the agriculture sector is very important of course america's energy sector was very important a characteristic of third world countries it was absolutely exporting raw materials and importing finished goods as being go and that's the and we've seen too much progress in the last roughly twenty years toward that pattern which does very little for our economy again this year we saw a slight reversion to the kinds of trade patterns we'd like to see but we still have a long way to go right so why is it that were principally exporting raw materials and principally importing finished goods i mean we're shipping trees to china and they're using the living room boxes to ship computers back to us and that's where shipping the iron ore to china they're making millions of the computer cases or shipping you know. machinery. in fact one of the items in your list was chip

manufacturing equipment right exactly new machines that were discarded right right it's like holy cow we're exporting machines that manufactured ships should we be using them well we certainly do but the robust exports of this of a conductor manufacturing quit and go over the world tell you that a greater and greater percentage of global semiconductor production activity is taking place outside america and that's something to be very worried about how do we fix that we fix it by by transforming u.s. trade policy into the kind of a vehicle that president trump and various other trade critics have been talking about which is it's got to focus on incentivizing production and employment in this country rather than encouraging offshoring and it's encourage way too much offshoring as adam smith want to want the wealth of nations is is literally what they manufacture that's right because in compas is as he recognized even before

economists were talking about you know fancy words law like productivity he realized it incorporated knowledge reflected knowledge and knowledge was the nation's most important economic asset by far so the knowledge necessary to engineer something to design something to invent something to manufacture and which also spins off great services which in turn are or knowledge intensive themselves and this is the big problem the administration has been saying they're going to go after china that they're forcing the export of knowledge of technology right the chinese essentially hold up american corporations to blackmail standards they say if you don't transfer a lots of your very best know how to chinese partners which are invariably controlled by the chinese government you don't get access to this big chinese market that you value so much remarkable alan tonelson my pleasure great having you with us i think and that's the way it is tonight and don't forget democracy is not a spectator sport get out there get active tag you're it.

what you have for breakfast yesterday why would you put those for the faces your wife or two dogs may like to name and that was your biggest fear in a bit on a hay ride with no less time to read a book or you say if you have a man who's the best quarterback. that's point the topic that doesn't belong on the field now i did give you due to a question more. all .